disGraceofthe20thcentury

As I was reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I was very interested in the topic of Obeah. In the novel, Christophine is known as a follower of Obeah, and is depicted in scenes as early as Antoinette’s early childhood as distrustful because of her following of these traditions. People around Antoinette believed that Christophine could summon zombies and thought that she was not to be crossed, or else they would be affected by evil spirits through Christophine. Even Antoinette was frightened of her practices in Obeah; in part one, Antoinette narrates: “I was certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it.” She also mentions here that she has never been taught about what Obeah really was, but was certain of herself that she already knows about it. With this description, Obeah sounds really ho...

The other day in class, my group and I discussed the article ,”Psychological Interpretation of the novel The Stranger by Camus” by R.Gnanasekaran, in which the author provides several psychoanalytical ideas to explain Mersault as a character in The Stranger. In this article, he described many interesting psychological and philosophical ideas, such as absurdism, existentialism, and commitment phobia, but there were some we were not able to discuss. Therefore, I want to pinpoint and build on the idea of phobic neurosis that the author mentions in his article. To quote the author’s explanation of phobic neurosis directly, “phobias result from anxiety that is produced by id impulses. This anxiety is displaced from the id impulses to an object or situation that has some symbolic connection with this fear. These objects or situations then become the phobic stimuli.” When I read “phobic stimuli”, I immediately thought of Mersault’s difficulties of coping with the sun and it...